The coffee stain

She stroked the soft black notebook under her robes such as a mother strokes her child’s cheek, to marvel and reassure herself at its incredible existence. She steadied her breathing to bring her footsteps into order. It was not done for a woman to run through the souk. Only children and tea urchins ran the cobbled streets. To run would bring a questioning attention. In regular days, she would have lingered in the souk,and breathed in deeply the floating Omani frankincense whilst she allowed herself the pleasure of the finest Pashminas to slip between her fingers. She would have slowed to hear the insistent call of the merchants vying for her attention, offering their wares and enjoying the inevitable haggle, whilst weakly protesting that her low prices kept their children from food. Of course, it did not. It was the ancient ritual of the souk. Happiness came when a good bargain was struck and friendship beyond coinage was understood. But those had been the regular days. And those days had not been for quite some time. Today was not a regular day.

The exertion to remain calm formed small droplets on her high cheekbones making her shine in the cool of the day. Her black robes felt heavier than ever, matching her heart. Leaving her home that day was a breach of her heart that she had thoroughly underestimated. But she pushed her mind beyond it. She had lost so much in the past months and years that it was purposeless to linger on the thought. She continued to move through the souk averting her eyes lest anyone see her and delay her. Worse, that they see the ambition in her eyes.

Her pace steadied and her mind returned to his eyes. To the soldier to whom she had spoken but a few words. It was haram, forbidden. But the times were such that the old world was blurring and what once would have been seen and denounced was now hardly noticed. Especially for a young woman with no father, no mother, no brother. Only a distracted uncle and aunt to whom she mattered little except for the burden she brought and the servitude she gave. Such is war. What once was valued, becomes valueless. Survival the only treasure.

The coffee she served him each day became the moment above all other moments. Each day he would be there. Sometimes alone, sometimes with other military. She knew his ways now. His eyes had seen much sorrow, but had not hardened. He could see in her eyes the quick flight of a soft smile as its wings brushed across her brow. Each day a page ripped from a book, stained with coffee, was left seemingly carelessly under the dallah holding the remnants of his cold coffee. Often soft poems from the revered philosopher Khalil Gibran. Sometimes a page from an English book with photos of green fields and stone cottages surrounded by wild flowers. People with bright smiles and prim hats in market squares carrying baskets of fresh strawberries. But what pleased her the most were the bicycles. Shiny, bright bicycles. And the country lanes. Intact country lanes. No pot holes, no IUD craters, no scars of wars, no blockades. To ride carefree seemed utterly unimaginable to her now. Her years as a young girl riding in the fields with her brother was a memory almost erased. It had stopped with the war. And if not for the war, it would have been stopped by her pubescence. It was haram for women to cycle.

His eyes held her eyes each day. At first, she would not meet his eyes, looking away as the world demanded of her. But her world was changing by the day, each hour, each moment. The bombs, the noise, the death, the grief, the fear, the threats, the losses were ceaseless. No longer the regular world. And it was these moments that changed her. The moments with him had changed her.

With the souk behind her, she turned left into a narrow alley lined with low, mud faced houses, arched with an ancient weariness. The solid wooden doorway was such as many others. Pock marked, grim with age and non-descript. She felt for the book again under her robes. It felt like the Pashmina in the souk now. Made all the more soft for the many nights she had held it to her cheek and stroked it’s face until she fell asleep.

“For when the day comes” he said softly, holding her eyes steadfastly to his and turning to the table. A black notebook was next to the dallah. Not coffee stained. It’s cover, black and smooth. Perfect and peaceful. She quickly slipped it under her black robes. He held her eyes for a moment longer. Then walked out and had never returned.

That night she cradled the book to her face and breathed in the musk of its pages, the fragrance of his hands. It was bound closed by a thin, firmly knotted, plait in the same soft leather as it’s cover. Her fingers pulled at the knot and the plait came away. She tentatively turned the cover. On each vanilla page he had clipped a 100 dollar note. Some pages more, much more. The crisp green nestling against the smooth, blank sheafs. She turned the pages again and again. $20,000.

She did not sleep. She could not sleep. On the last page, in his own hand, in sweeping Arabic, he wrote the words her heart already knew:

Where are you now, my other self?

Are you awake in the silence of the night?

Let the clean breeze convey to you

my heart’s every beat and affection.

Are you fondling my face in your memory?

Where are you, my beloved?

Do you hear my weeping from

beyond the ocean?

Do you understand my need?

Do you know the greatness of my patience?

Khalil’s words in “A Lover’s Call” bonded them and, in the firm press of a pencil, so did an address in another land.

Standing on the pot holed street, she stopped and wiped the shine from her cheeks. She raised her eyes to the mottled, carved sign above the non-descript doorway :

“Mohammed bin Abdullah al Saadiyat, Merchant of Journeys”.

The shine now in her eyes, she stepped over the threshold with the soft black book in her hand, as she whispered “The day has come, my love”.